Julian Kossoff is a senior editor for Telegraph.co.uk. He is an award-winning journalist who has written extensively on race and religion.

Who is 'the Jewish Person of the Year'?

Judaism has just celebrated its New Year (5771). Here are my top five movers 'n' shakers in the Jewish world over the course of the last 12 months.

1) Gilad Shalit – Israeli soldier and Hamas captive

The young army conscript had his fourth anniversary as a captive of Hamas, hidden somewhere in Gaza, it is believed. He has become the poster-boy of Jewish pain and anger at being confronted by a merciless enemy committed to holy war by the unholiest of means. Gone is the once-proud promise that a humanitarian Israel always brought its solders home – dead or alive.

Meanwhile, the quiet dignity of his parents, Noam or Aviva, who have campaigned with decency and without bitterness for their son's release, proves that heroes are not just found on the battlefield.

2) The Miliband brothers

One or the other is set to be the new leader of the Labour Party and quite possibly the first Jewish Prime Minister (though for some Benjamin Disraeli, who was converted to Christianity as a school boy, has already claimed that mantle). Ed and David are scions of classic Left-wing Jewish European intellectuals. Their parents, Ralph and Marion, came from a Yiddish world that they rejected as reactionary, and they found a new faith in Marxism. As a result the sons are totally assimilated, though neither have shamed themselves with any statements of outright self-denial.

Indeed, Ed was genuinely touched when a long-lost elderly Jewish relative called a radio talk show he was appearing on during an official visit to Moscow. He hot-footed it round to her tiny apartment and spent the afternoon getting up to speed on the family history.

Still, they only minimally identify and to be honest there is more chance of seeing them inside No 10 Downing Street than a synagogue.

3) Benjamin Netanyahu

Israel's PM has played a blinder this year, culminating in the restart of a new round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

He's patched up differences with the Obama administration, held together a fractious political coalition, survived the Gaza flotilla debacle, and launched tenative efforts to loosen the shackles of Occupation, e.g, reducing the number of
checkpoints on the West Bank and dismantling stretches of the "Security Wall".

Many are sceptical that the new peace talks can achieve anything – both sides are waiting for the opportunity to blame the other for the expected breakdown – and Netanyahu is only turning up to garner the requisite brownie points with White House to permit an air strike on Iran's nuclear facilities next year.

But there is a minority report that Netanyahu, far from repeating the devious sledging tactics of the 90s, is thinking of his legacy and could be poised to reveal himself as Israel's de Gaulle – proving the political law that only hawks can make peace – and write himself into the history books by negotiating a deal with the Palestinians.

Sands set out to prove that the Jewish people never existed as a "nation-race" with a common origin, but rather is a colourful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion. Max Hastings called it, "a formidable polemic against claims that Israel has a moral right to define itself as an explicitly and exclusively Jewish society."

Dismissed by opponents as just re-hash and distortion of previous works, including Arthur Koestler's 13th Tribe, its significance was the precision of its timing.

It became a counterblance to a dogmatic religious-nationalist narrative that casts any territorial concession on the West Bank/Judea and Samaria as a biblical heresy, and emblematic of the archipelago of dissent – academia, the press, the arts, pressure group politics and the judiciary – that proves Israel remains a fully-functioning democracy.

5) Elena Kagan – US Supreme Court Judge

The second Jewish woman to sit on the US Supreme Court – it's now composed of three Jews and three women. A feisty character who even as a schoolgirl was breaking the mould when she challenged religious sexual discrimination demanding that her Orthodox bat-mitvah take place inside synagogue.

Comfortable with her roots, she gave Congress a classic Jewish comedy moment and had the Senate Judicary
Committee in giggles when a question from South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham probing Kagan on threats to the United States, asked her if she was unnerved by the Christmas Day bomber.

“Where were you on Christmas Day?” Graham asked.
“Like all Jews,” Kagan responded, “I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

Aged 50, this liberal, intellectual Jew with high-minded ideals will be a torch-bearer for President Obama's legacy for many years to come.